Posted on 08/24/2005 2:35:39 PM PDT by neverdem
Taking on one of the most highly charged questions in the abortion debate, a team of doctors has concluded that fetuses probably cannot feel pain in the first six months of gestation and therefore do not need anesthesia during abortions.
Their report, being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is based on a review of several hundred scientific papers, and it says that nerve connections in the brain are unlikely to have developed enough for the fetus to feel pain before 29 weeks.
The finding poses a direct challenge to proposed federal and state laws that would compel doctors to tell women having abortions at 20 weeks or later that their fetuses can feel pain and to offer them anesthesia specifically for the fetus.
About 1.3 million abortions a year are performed in the United States, 1.4 percent of them at 21 weeks or later.
Bills requiring that women be warned about fetal pain have been introduced in the House and Senate and in 19 states, and recently passed in Georgia, Arkansas and Minnesota. The bills are supported by many anti-abortion groups. But advocates for abortion rights say the real purpose of the measures is to discourage women from seeking abortions. It is too soon to tell what effect the new laws are having in abortion clinics.
The finding was considered persuasive by many scientists but is unlikely to settle the controversy. Most scientists agree that fetuses probably do not feel pain in the first trimester, but there remains wide disagreement over when, in later pregnancy, the fetal brain is sufficiently developed for pain to register. Some think that, with the current state of knowledge, it is impossible to know for sure. In Britain, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said that fetuses probably...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I have taken care of many 23 and 24 gestational age infants and I can assure you they feel pain. Their heart rates and BPs increase when we have to perform painful procedures.
This really pi$$es me off!!!
It's interesting that now there are a number of counseling groups popping up which are just for women and even men who are dealing with the guilt from an abortion. That must be pure hell.
Unless a trip through the birth canal activates the nerves, which we know it doesn't,
If the mothers don't care to kill the baby, why should they be given pain-killers. I would force them to see the aborted baby so they can see and live with the fact that they are murders .
Leave evolution out of this. You can accept the mountains of data that support the theory of evolution and still be against abortion.
I am one of those.
Again, JAMA is a political tool. They did a much-cited study a while ago claiming that homicide was the leading cause of death among pregnant women. However scrutinization of that claim showed the conclusion to be useless. That did not prevent the fems from running around citing it until they were blue in the face. It has become one of those "factoids" - often cited although discredited.
JAMA is also in the forefront of the anti-gun movement.
I am sure that a close review of this study will show it to be useless junk, misleading or even outright false.
The fact that the claim was recited in the New York Slimes, in my mind, decreases its credibility. This types of political "studies" tend to be cooked up months in advance, and sympathetic media people are contacted beforehand so they can get the claims into the public conscienceness before those claims have a chance to be debunked.
Hey, BG -- did Logan feel anything at 29 weeks?
Instead this is what is called a "meta-analysis," a notorious way of saying "BULLSH*T."
Well, "physicians" used to think that if and when someone hit their head and had a headache afterward, that it was because some sort of "bad vapor" or bad something had entered your skull (because of the impact, regardless of how minor, just any bump, jarring, anything that preceded a headache of whatever kind, and they assumed a cause and affect relationship because of the two events), anyway, their solution was to drill a hole in the skull and leave it open, to allow the "bad" thing to depart your skull.
So people would be sent away afterward with holes drilled in their skulls to go about their lives and then would die of massive bacterial infections days afterward, and the doctors would determine the cause of the death to be that the bad whatever had not sufficiently or fully departed the skull (and then drill even larger holes in the heads of their next patients just to be 'sure').
They didn't know what bacteria was or that such a thing could even exist. They didn't understand infections or what caused them (bacteria) but evaluated them instead to be some bad thing/presence, some spirit or another causing the skin to "grow proud".
Anyway, that was the practice of medicine not too awfully long ago as history is measured.
Such that, this current thing about "fetuses not feeling pain until 29-weeks" seems another one of those "all competent incompetent" declarations by, um, "scientists."
If you take the life of a fetus, a human child in the womb, I'm sure it's not a good experience. Perhaps that's how they're getting around calling the experience "painful," by just calling it "death." Or, "discomfort."
It's a ridiculous concept, that a baby feels no pain while he/she is having his/her body torn apart.
That's for late term abortions. I believe at 21 weeks instruments hack and yank them out, but I'm not sure.
I just don't understand how someone could murder a baby. It just breaks my heart.
One would think that the eventual self inflicted genocide by the liberals would make them a dieing breed altogether...yet they still appear to have enough breeding pairs so they can perpetuate their insanity...Abortion is genocide in plain view.
I was born around 29 weeks.
Abortion is un-American!
What are the chances that a like study will report that death-row inmates gradually lose there ability to feel pain over time.
Susan J. Lee, JD; Henry J. Peter Ralston, MD; Eleanor A. Drey, MD, EdM; John Colin Partridge, MD, MPH; Mark A. Rosen, MD
(link to JAMA abstract)Fetal-pain study omits an abortion-rights link
But their seven-page article has a weakness: It does not mention that one author is an abortion clinic director, while the lead author - Susan J. Lee, a medical student - once worked for NARAL Pro-Choice America.
JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine D. DeAngelis said she was unaware of this, and acknowledged it might create an appearance of bias that could hurt the journal's credibility. "This is the first I've heard about it," she said. "We ask them to reveal any conflict of interest. I would have published" the disclosure if it had been made.
UCSF obstetrician-gynecologist Eleanor A. Drey, medical director of the abortion clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, said: "We thought it was critical to include an expert in abortion among the authors. I think my presence... should not serve to politicize a scholarly report."
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
If it's not alive(which libs keep telling themselves and us, it's just tissues), why does "it" need pain management?
It's like playing soft music to Terry Schivo(sp?) so her starving to death would be more humane.
All you premies, quit kidding yourselves, you're not alive... maybe you're in denial, wait you have to be alive to be in denial...
I think I'm going to be sick now...
Yeah, that word caught my attention too.
If you play Russian Roulette with less that half of the cylinders of a .45 revolver loaded it will "probably" not fire and you will "probably" not get shot in the head. Anyone want to give it a try?
FANTASTIC bumper sticker!!!!
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